>Terry,
>Good ideas but I have already done all that. My reindex routine deletes the tags and recreates them manually. The real clincher is that the very same line of code works(ed) in other places in the program on the same machine. We reinstalled the runtimes, and did an update on the exe file so that everything was new except the actual dbf file. The problem still occured. We had the customer do a backup and download it here. We installed the backup on a Win2000 machine. Same problem. I installed it on a Win98Se test machine. Worked like a charm. I changed the code from 'set order to tag recnum' to 'set order to tag 4' and it worked on all machines. I have now renamed the index so this problem should go away, but IT IS JUST TOO ARBITRARY! We are supposed to be dealing with zeros and ones not zeros, ones, and question marks.

Did the runtime update include SP updates?

True - but working through the arbitrary is why we get the big bucks:) I get those things every once in a while - well, actually more than I would care to admit. I was birding my console last week!! Real bad! My app would crash and open the prg to show the line with the error - I'd make a change, and the requisite message would pop up: "Remove classes from memory", I'd answer yes, and the message would pop again. It was not affecting my application, but it was weird. I did some cleanup, and - magically - it went away! The app had DBFs forms and PRGs with the same name. Those reserved words are tricky. Sometimes they hurt and others, we get away with it. It would be nice if VFP was not so forgiving, and would not allow a RESEVERED word for a variable or object name.